Waiting for Content to Load on Your Smartphone Is as Stressful as Watching a Horror Movie

Boo.

We all know the feeling of watching Netflix and seeing that ominous buffering notification. Some of us even get heart palpitations, according to a new study. Ericsson, a Swedish tech company, ran a test to measure the effect of mobile delays on internet users, and the results are not very surprising, but a little concerning. Named “The Stress of Streaming Delays,” the experiment found that users’ heart rates increase (by 38%!) whenever there’s a delay at all, and stress levels go up by 3% when there's a delay of just two seconds. According to the study, “once a video begins, a single pause an cause stress levels to increase 15 additional percentage points.”

To perform the study, researchers measured brain, heart, and pulse activity of 30 subjects (a very small sample) while they used their phones, and discovered that the subjects’ heart rates increased an average of 38% with mobile content delays. “The level of stress caused by mobile delays was comparable to watching a horror movie,” the study says. As reported by New York, the report also explains, “With high time-to-content delays of 6 seconds, half of the participants exhibited a 19% increase relative to baseline levels while the other half exhibited signs of resignation — their eye movements indicated distraction and stress levels dropped.” Meaning that after just six seconds of re-buffering, the users gave up, realizing that if their video wasn’t loading then, it probably wouldn’t load at all.